Why So Few Women in Skilled Trades Finish the Training

Canada has spent years trying to recruit more women in skilled trades, and the recruiting part is now working far better than the keeping. In 2023, 582 women registered as welding apprentices across the country — a record, and a long way up from the 69 who signed on at the turn of the century. Completions that same year: 105.

A program in Sault Ste. Marie is aimed squarely at that second number. The Supporting Women in Skilled Trades Project, run by the Sault Community Career Centre alongside the Sault Ste. Marie Construction Association and the District of Sault Ste. Marie Social Services Administration Board, launched in 2025 with federal funding through Employment and Social Development Canada. It costs participants nothing, and it's open to anyone who identifies as a woman.

The pitch isn't a course. No tuition, no classroom, no certificate waiting at the end. What the project offers is the unglamorous scaffolding that usually decides whether an apprenticeship sticks — someone to decode the paperwork, someone who has already done the job, and a room of people in the same position once a month.

The Number Behind the Recruitment Push

Women hold 48.2 per cent of all occupations in Canada but just 14.8 per cent of Red Seal roles, according to the CWB Group. Strip out the service-sector trades — cooking, hairstyling — and the share of women in skilled trades collapses to 5.2 per cent. That gap is why the federal initiative funding this project targets 39 eligible Red Seal trades clustered in construction and manufacturing.

What the Sault Program Actually Gives You

Nothing here assumes you're already on the tools. The project takes people who are merely curious, people partway through an apprenticeship, and people working in the trade right now. The supports fall into three parts.

One-on-One Help With the Apprenticeship System

Ontario's apprenticeship path is genuinely confusing. You generally need an employer willing to sponsor you before most of it begins, and registration, in-school blocks and hour tracking each run on their own clock. The project provides personalized guidance on getting registered and navigating that system — precisely the stage where a lot of would-be apprentices quietly walk away.

A Mentor Who Has Already Done the Job

The centre maintains a mentorship network of experienced tradeswomen who share advice and real-world detail. That matters more than it sounds. Isolation surfaces again and again in research on why women in skilled trades leave, and being the only woman on a crew is a materially different job from being one of five.

Monthly Meetups, Not Just Paperwork

Every month the career centre hosts a gathering open to working tradeswomen, apprentices in training, and anyone just kicking the tires. Officially it's networking. The plainer word is friendship. Workshops, celebrations of milestones and employer partnerships run alongside, aimed at making the worksites themselves easier places to stay.

Meet the Truck Technician Who Says 'I'm a Mover'

Shannan Belanger is a truck and coach technician with Avery Construction in Sault Ste. Marie, and she's the face the project is putting forward. She went back to college for motive power, tried it, liked it, and never looked back. Her own compressed summary of why the work fits her has become the headline on her story.

I'm a mover.

Belanger's route is worth flagging because it was a second start, not a first one. Motive power — trucks, heavy equipment, diesel engines — is a field where the shortage is real and the pay reflects it, and it's rarely on the list of options put in front of girls in high school.

Why Women in Skilled Trades Leave Before the Red Seal

The welding figures tell the story in miniature: registrations are up more than eight times since 2000, while completions lag badly behind. Canada logged over 459,000 registered apprenticeships in 2023, and the drop-off between starting and certifying is the sector's oldest problem. It gets sharply worse when a worker has no peers, no mentor and nobody to ask about a difficult foreman.

Which is why a mentorship-and-community model — soft-looking next to a cash subsidy — is what the federal Women in the Skilled Trades Initiative keeps backing. Money gets people through the door. Retention is what converts a registration into a certified journeyperson, and a journeyperson into a thirty-year career.

How to Get In If You're Not in the Sault

If you're local, the Career Centre is the direct route, and the monthly meeting is the lowest-commitment way to look before you leap. The same federal initiative funds comparable projects supporting women in skilled trades across other provinces, so outside Northern Ontario the search worth running is your local employment services agency plus "women in trades."

One practical check before anything else: the 39 eligible trades sit mostly in construction and manufacturing, so confirm your target trade is actually on that Red Seal list before you count on this kind of support. Then go to one meeting. The people in that room have already solved the problem you're about to run into.